[prog] Using HTTP to interact with desktop applications

[Meredydd]

On Tuesday 04 May 2004 23:29, Douglas Hunter wrote:
>    http://people.plusthree.com/~dug/edit_over_http.html
The first thing that my mind jumps to is "great, but not 
backwards-compatible" - and, unfortunately, I can't really see a 
suggestion, however brilliant, to sway (for example) the behemoth that 
is the IE development team. So, one thing I think it really needs is 
backward-compatibility - some way of falling back to the aforementioned 
horrible hacks / HTML forms rather than WYSIWYG / existing methods for 
launching applets or ActiveX. If you want it to be accepted by users, 
unfortunately, it can't really be an "If your browser supports blah, 
click here, else click here. The first thing which pops into my head is 
sending a normal page (to launch the HTML form / ActiveX control / 
whatever, or at least to redirect to a page which will), with some 
custom headers, plus one more - a URL from which to actually get the 
content. That way, a browser which just ignores your headers would 
still present a seamless (if somewhat basic) user interface to the 
client, and one with extensions installed would do the funky stuff.

Unfortunately, you use content-type too, which is, I suppose, the 
sensible way of going about the task, but would blow the above approach 
out of the water. I'm sure you could come up with something better, 
though...

Meredydd